Surely one of the most iconoclastic books (in the truest sense of the word) ever written by a major writer, Moses and Monotheism is comprised of several essays on the subject that occupied Freud in his final years, during a time when WWII was raging and he often wondered if his writings (or his name) would survive for posterity, as he was admired by neither fascists nor communists. If you take the Bible at its word, you are aware that Moses was one of the greatest mass-murderers in history, seemingly never tiring of ordering executions of heathens and sinners by the thousands. But Freud goes a step further and cites much evidence and deductive reasoning suggesting that the “great man” was also a calculating zealot who managed to transform a superstitious band of nomads into the “chosen people.” Freud argues that there is little justification for believing that Moses was a Hebrew by birth since it is customary for cultures to create their own origin stories to reconcile with later circumstances, and because the name ‘Moses’ seems to have no meaning in Hebrew while it is similar to common Egyptian names like Thutmose. The historical timeline places the Biblical story of the Exodus quite close to the 18th Dynasty reign of not Ramses II but Akhenaten, the heretic Pharaoh who invented monotheism by outlawing Egypt’s traditional pagan cults in favor of a single sun god, Aten. Moses would have been a devotee of this new religion and when Akhenaten was overthrown, he fled Egypt and took the Hebrews with him as their new adopted leader. His fabled speech impediment, unlikely in such a charismatic public figure, may really have been his unfamiliarity with the Hebrew tongue. Moses then mixed his own devout Atenic faith with the Hebrew’s anti-Egypitianism to create what became the Jewish religion, using a volcanic Midianite deity named Jahve as a compromise god around which to unite his people. (The Mosaic law against graven images is a fairly clear reaction against one of the hated Egyptian’s most well-known activities.) Vestiges of the fearsome and Ba’al-like Jahve remain in the Bible, of course; the mountaintop manifestations, the burning bush, pillars of fire, and open fissures in the earth that swallow the unfaithful, all of which bear little resemblance to the discarnate god of love and pacifism later promoted by both Jews and Christians. One of the most interesting parts of Freud’s thesis is the idea that Moses alone, no matter how forceful he was, could not have instilled in the Jewish people their famous resilience and profound sense of guilt. This could only have occurred because at some point Moses’ followers, jaded by years of toil in the wilderness, rebelled against him and killed him. This true end of Moses is obscured in the scriptures by a story having him, at the age of 120, wandering off into the mountains to die alone after handing over power to Joshua; an incident often also taken to mean that he was taken up into heaven without tasting death. Freud’s implication is borne out by many similar myths in ancient religions in which a holy man’s origin and fate both have to be rendered mysterious in order to justify continued obedience to the laws that bear his name. The brutal, even sadistic, Law of Moses, with its huge catalog of extreme proscriptions and inhumane punishments, was designed to keep a rowdy and rebellious people in line, pure and simple. One of the most barbaric of these practices that has come down to us intact is the custom of circumcision. As evidence of one’s consecration to God, it has lost all meaning in the modern world, but retains – as Freud points out convincingly – its primordial, tribal purposes pertaining to humiliation and disfigurement. It doesn’t take much strain to recognize it as a similitude of castration, once implemented by a chief against the sons who would compete for his crown. It is also quite obviously a violent and neurotic attempt to curtail lustful thoughts as a perpetual reminder that further punishment awaits misuse of the sex organs. Freud sees evidence of Moses’ murder and subsequent veneration in the rise of Christianity, which replaces a father-based religion with a son-based one. A fuzzy notion of “original sin” is not enough, he says, to demand the requirement of blood atonement. The only sin that could warrant the death of a favored son would be the murder of a father. Freud is careful to express his lack of expertise in theological matters, and says at the outset that his concern is psychological as well as anthropological. He merely suggests possibilities that future generations can either prove or disprove. In any case, this thoughtful and thought-provoking book is certainly more plausible and humane than the Pentateuch it scrutinizes.
No comments:
Post a Comment